


The Sounds of a Ticking Clock

by flipflop_diva



Category: Quantico (TV)
Genre: Alternating Timelines, At least not really, Comfort/Angst, Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Episode s01e11 Inside, Spoilers, Threesome - F/F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-07 21:44:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5471762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/pseuds/flipflop_diva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been six hours since the second bomb went off, but still, there was no news. No news and nothing to do but wait and hope and remember. (Major spoilers for ep 1.11 'Inside')</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sounds of a Ticking Clock

**Author's Note:**

  * For [threeguesses](https://archiveofourown.org/users/threeguesses/gifts).



> So I had this super snarky, kinda fluffy, probably really smutty fic planned out, and then I sat down and this came out instead. I really loved your prompts, threeguesses, so I really hope some of this is what you wanted! Happy Yuletide!

It was more horrible than anything she could have ever imagined or expected. As soon as they’d heard the second explosion, she’d feared the worst — another populated hotel, a populated street corner. Hundreds of dead people. Carnage everywhere. The nightmare of a few days before reliving itself again.

But no. This was worse. So much worse. 

She could feel the heat of the fire even from across the street, and her stomach turned. Blood seemed to drain from her body, leaving her weak, nauseous. She stared, not comprehending, not wanting to understand what she was seeing.

“The command center.” 

The words left her mouth before she even knew she had spoken them. As if saying the words would make it not true, would make her wake up from what must be a nightmare. Because of everything that had happened since she left her apartment that fateful morning, this was by far the most awful.

“Was anyone there? Was anyone in there?” Simon, his voice shaking. Simon, who had also been set up. Simon, who had also been betrayed. But his words, asking the question she didn’t want asked. The shifting of the others, everyone staring, no one moving, no one daring to run into the street, to get closer to the horror.

But she couldn’t stand there. She couldn’t just stand there.

She broke into a run.

Two steps later, a hand grabbed her arm, yanked her backward. Hard. Making her stumble and almost fall. 

Natalie.

“You can’t!” Natalie said, and her fingers clenched on Alex’s arm left no room for argument. “They think you’re in there!”

Alex knew that, she did, but she couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe. Everything was closing in. Her world, her life. Exploding into flames just like the ones that were shooting out of the building across the street.

She stared at the horror, and there was nothing she could do.

“Shelby,” she whispered, and she felt her heart break.

•••

_“So do you often have sex in cars with strangers you just met?”_

_Alex snapped open her suitcase, started pulling out her clothes, purposely not looking at the blonde girl on the other side of the room, also unpacking a suitcase. “I don’t think I know you well enough yet to answer that. What’s your name again? Shelley?”_

_“Heh.” Alex could hear, rather than see, Shelby smirk. “Just trying to find out what type of person I’m living with for the next few months.”_

_“Oh?” Alex turned to look at her. “And what if I told you I hear she was an insatiable sexual freak who actually has sex with strangers everyone and not just in cars? Maybe even …” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “shared bathrooms.”_

_Shelby turned around as well, met her stare. She, too, dropped her voice to a whisper. “Well, then,” she said. “I might ask her one day if I can join in.”_

•••

He was out of bed, even though he wasn’t supposed to be, and moving toward the door when she rushed in. She didn’t stop moving, just went directly into his arms, trying to be mindful of his ribs, of his wounds, but it was hard — she needed him, needed his embrace, needed to feel his body next to hers. She could handle anything. She could. She had prided herself on that all her life — on her the ability to get by, to do what was needed. On the very things that were supposed to make her a good FBI agent. But right now, right here, she needed him. And she knew he needed her, too. They both needed the only other person who understood, who could possibly understand, how they felt. They needed someone to share the fear, the shock, the devastation. Maybe the grief.

“I heard,” he said, and that was it. No words of comfort, no words of anything. But it was okay. She didn’t need him to say anything else. Words weren’t going to make a difference now. Platitudes could change nothing, reveal nothing. 

She wrapped her arms tighter around him, buried her head in his chest, not caring that other people were watching. He did the same, his head dropping so his lips were on her hair. Standing together, like they were one, but not really, because a part of them was missing, a huge part, like a limb that had been cut off.

“Don’t give up,” he finally breathed into the barely-there space between them. “We don’t know anything.”

She jerked her head up, almost knocking into his chin. “That’s it,” she said, “We don’t know anything. We couldn’t get close. We couldn’t get anyone to tell us anything.” She reached into her pocket, pulled out the phone Natalie had given her since hers was long gone, taken back when she had been put into handcuffs. “I’ve called her. Over and over and over.”

It just went straight to voicemail, she didn’t have to say. It didn’t even ring. The way broken phones don’t ring. Smashed phones. Burnt phones.

She trailed off. Horrible images were dancing behind her eyes, in her mind. The same images she had been seeing for hours. The same images she couldn’t not see. 

Shelby. Hurt. Burning. Dead.

She felt the prick of tears and she buried her head in Ryan again, tried to feel safe in his embrace. She would not cry. Not here, not now, not until they knew. 

She felt helpless, lost. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. 

Them against the world. That’s what they had joked, back at Quantico, in the dark of night when they all laid in bed together. Even back in the early days when everyone wore their secrets close to their hearts, they had known they would protect each other if they could.

She thought now, as she clung to Ryan, as he clung to her, that she would give her life for that perky blonde girl from the south who had squirmed her way so unexpectedly into her heart — and into Ryan’s heart — and whose missing presence was now a void that couldn’t be patched.

•••

_“I’m not really sure this was the interview interrogation techniques they wanted us to practice.” Shelby propped her head up on her elbow and grinned at the two of them from Alex’s left side._

_“Oh, I don’t know.” Alex reached out, stroking a finger over Shelby’s bare breast. “I think I learned quite a lot about the two of you.”_

_“Did you now?” Ryan leaned down to take one of Alex’s nipples in his mouth. “Like what exactly?”_

_“Well,” Alex said, stopping to moan softly at Ryan’s ministrations and moving her hand down toward the apex of Shelby’s legs. “I definitely learned what makes you scream. And I’m pretty sure I could get either of you to do whatever I asked if I tried a certain technique or two.” She slipped a finger inside Shelby, causing her to groan._

_“I don’t know,” Shelby managed around her groans. “I think I can handle myself pretty well.”_

_Alex cast a sidelong glance at Ryan. “That sounds like a challenge to me,” she told him with a smirk._

_“Oh, it does,” he replied. “And it is accepted.”_

•••

They would have made her go back to headquarters but there was no headquarters now, no command center, no place to pool their info. Everything was destroyed, gone, lost. So instead they put her in a room in the hospital and let Liam and Miranda guard her. Protocol, they said, even though it wasn’t, and no one else seemed to be wondering why she hadn’t been in the command center being interrogated when she was supposed to have been, even though they all knew people would start asking soon enough. 

It probably looked bad, might end up looking really bad, but she couldn’t care about that now. The ones who mattered knew it wasn’t her — she was with them when the bomb went off, when it was set. They knew she would never have put a bomb in the command center, not when she didn’t know who could have been there, not when it could have been Shelby.

Was Shelby.

So now Alex was in a hospital, being guarded by Liam, by Miranda, sitting next to Ryan who escaped from his room despite the stern looks of his doctors, but what did those doctors know anyway? They didn’t know how much Alex and Ryan needed each other right now, how much they couldn’t be apart. They had already lost too much.

They sat together, side by side, in silence. The others were silent too. Everyone waiting, the clock ticking.

The phone, Liam’s phone, ringing or beeping every once in a while. Each time, everyone jumping, looking up. And then he was barking orders, asking questions, but there was no news, there was never any news.

So they went back to waiting, side by side, in silence, Alex’s fingers and Ryan’s finally finding each other’s, grasping, holding, seeking any tiny bit of comfort that could possibly be found within a situation that promised none.

•••

_“So will your undercover wife slash ex-wife be cool with this arrangement?”_

_They were lying together, limbs entangled, the slight light of the moon through the window casting shadows over their bodies, across their faces. Shelby’s question came out as a joke, but Alex could hear the serious undertones beneath it._

_So could Ryan apparently. He tightened his arms around both of them, held them a little closer, as they each rested on either side of him._

_“I’ll explain it to her.”_

_“You’re going to be gone a long time,” Alex said. “Shelby and I are going to finish training.”_

_“We’re going to be real FBI agents soon,” Shelby added, with another note of teasing in her voice._

_“We’ll make it work,” Ryan said. “We’ll figure it out.”_

_“You make it sound so easy.” Alex traced her fingers over the panes of his stomach. Shelby did the same on the other side. They were all quiet. They all knew the truth of the situation was so much more complicated than they were making it seem, but maybe …_

_Alex closed her eyes. Maybe it could work out._

_“It could be easy,” Ryan answered, like he was reading her mind._

_“I hope so,” Alex said, and she really did._

•••

“Should it take this long?” It had been six hours. Six entire hours — three hundred and sixty minutes — since the bomb had gone off, and there was nothing. No news, no confirmation, no suspicions. Or maybe there were suspicions and Liam just wasn’t telling them, but she had her own suspicions, the fears in her heart, the images of fire taking down a building playing repeatedly in her mind and on the TV that had been left on in the corner of the room.

She just needed to know.

A phone rang then. Soft but clear. Breaking through the silence, the unspoken fear. Ryan’s phone. He grabbed it off the table in front of him, looked at it, then stared at it some more, finally showing it to Alex. She blinked, heart in her throat. 

It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. Could it?

She reached out, her hand shaking, swiped the screen to answer. “Hello?”

It was an eternity before there was noise on the other end, before she heard a slight cough and a scratchy voice, before her world stopped again.

“Alex? It’s Shelby. I’m okay.”


End file.
